Chamath Palihapitiya

International Corporation, or SMIC in China, they launched a seven nanometer chip with Huawei in their Mate 60 Pro, which is sort of like their iPhone competitor in China.

And so they're proclaiming that they've already got this EUV technology from what I understand, and Saks would know better than I, it sounds like there was a lot of reverse engineering and workaround of existing technology in order to deliver that system.

Got it.

Who do you think has the best chance of challenging NVIDIA?

My early prediction for 2026 is Huawei, where I think that there's lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China.

So announcements 2026, impact 2027?

Probably fair.

I honestly don't think that the Reuters story is necessarily news because I think it's a little bit of a narrow scope in trying to describe what happened, which is that they, quote, stole ASML technology because scientists are working on it.

That's not really the full scope of what's been going on in China for a number of years.

And it really understates the technological progress that China's independently made in using other systems to try and achieve lithography parity.

So if you go back a number of years, the current kind of investment vehicle is actually Chinese banks put capital into a fund that's roughly $48 billion US dollars.

which is actually what's called the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase 3.

So there was Phase 1, which started in 2014, which focused on manufacturing, so developing fabs with groups like SMIC.

Phase 2 was stood up in 2019, which focused primarily on design and materials.

And then this Phase 3 fund was established in 2024, explicitly to pivot to what they call choke points or bottlenecks in the manufacturing process.

And state media has confirmed the existence of this phase three fund and the intentionality of the phase three fund to try and replicate lithography technology.

A couple of months ago, if you pull up the link, Nick, here's a publication on this paper.

So this is the leading research group out of China that's been backing into lithography technology using AI driven systems.

They published this paper, which was a very good summary of where they are in July.

Was this in Nature?